IAR
by NGTM-R
Summary: A series about the Coalition State's Infantry Assault Robots, and those who pilot them.
1. IAR

IAR

"Oh damn, they really went to town here." I muttered.

"Yeah. Not pretty is it?" The gunner's head swung back and forth slowly as she examined the scene, while the Raptor's torso rotated along with her head. Sitting so far forward the rotation was out of sync with the speed her head moved. Raptors are not easy to get used to.

The place had been dubbed "New Hope" by the citizens. It was a recent joiner to the Coalition State of Lone Star after years of abuse by Pecos Raiders. The infantry company and attack helicopter flight that had based there to handle defense and policing had been enough to defend the people, but not the town. Most of it was damaged, some of it was still burning as we and a rainstorm moved in.

We are Recon Company, Third Armored Battalion, Lone Star. We couldn't make this right. That was a job for the 'Smashers and 'Raisers of the Battle Company, they had the hands to help do so. But the sixteen of us, eight pilots and eight gunners for eight Raptors, could make it even.

I, we, call them Raptors. That's not their offical name. Officially they are the IAR-5 Hellfire. Most of us have seen actual hellfire by this point and we aren't that keen on the name anymore. Most of us have seen the actual raising of hell too, but the 'Raiser pilots keep the name anyways. To us, the IAR-5 is the Raptor. You can argue over whether we mean "bird of prey" or "dinosaur" if you like. Both work.

I took another look around. It doesn't move when I do that. The main guns, gatling rails on the tips of our wings and plasma ejectors on the front end of the body, and the armored tube assemblies for missiles that form the wings, follow the gunner's gaze. It's more efficent that way. Neither of us has a direct view of outside anyways, you put on the helmet and you see through the VR interface. It's sophisicated, and it's proof against a brave or crazy guy with a satchel charge going after the cockpit, which is a real problem when you're only a few meters tall.

Ruined storefront, advertizing "Bread and" something. Butter, probably. Hard things to come by here towards the lower end of Coalition-controlled Lone Star. Half the building was collapsed, but it hadn't burned. Door was intact, shut. So were most of the windows. Not looting, then. "They were trying to make a point." I observed to the gunner.

"We'll just have to make our own point then," she replied. Smart girl. That's mostly what we do, make the point, teach the lesson that no attack on the Coalition States goes unavenged, no insult unanswered. It's a harsh lesson, but you usually have to teach it one group at a time. Communication is poor at best for the Pecos folks.

Command said they had a clue where to go from here. I turned the Raptor south, which was a no-brainer. Now we would hunt.

* * *

It's dark out there. I've seen pictures of what dark meant pre-Catacylsm. It's actually sort of pathetic. There are only three or four places in the States today where you can't look up at the night sky and see the Milky Way. Every Coaliton vehicle is equipped for celestial nav, we learn it all in school. Have to, the satellites don't work anymore, haven't for a hundred years. There are a lot of theories, but basically as far as we can tell somebody's still up there, probably the old Lagrange colonies, and they're shit-scared of what's going on down here and don't want any part of it, so they just shoot down anything that comes up from Earth and ignore anything that anybody down here tries to tell them.

That makes a hell of a lot sense. We're shit-scared of what's going too. Pity we can't step back from it like them.

Sure, maybe you're not scared. Maybe you're in one of the fortress-cities. Maybe you're up on 17-or-above in Chi-Town, behind ten feet of superalloy plate and only Emperor Prosek himself knows how many Army grunts, ISS 'Specters, and Dog Boys. Or maybe you're just batshit insane.

Out here, it's forward echelon. Being in Recon Company is about as forward echelon as it gets. We're out there, no buddies, no backup, just you, your gunner, your Raptor, and prayer if you bother. We're forward all right. We're right at the falling-off place.

And there's all kinds of stuff over the edge you don't want to meet. Take the Worm Wraiths for example. Look like men from distance. Wear men's clothes. Use men's weapons, nobody's sure how they learned. Live in our buildings and towns when they can. You don't see many here, we're too far east. But you do see them sometimes.

Did I mention they're made of slimey worm-things, are as tough as light power armor, and attempt to kill any human they lay eyes…or whatever they use for eyes…on?

"Heavy weapon on the three!" God bless this gunner. She's a good girl, good eyes. My last gunner was a better shot, but silent, creepy as hell, and not much help. I threw a few hopskips into a full stride and watched a rocket pass in front of us. The torso spun fast; you could make yourself sick in a Raptor pretty easy, it takes about a second to spin the torso 360.

She hosed down the Wraiths the underwing lasers. They're little things, not much more than rifle power on a turret, but they're the only weapon we've got that doesn't eat ammo or vast amounts of power. They didn't go down, so she gave them a gentle tap with the rails while I gave another one a kick, jinking and juking everything I've ever learned driving a Raptor. Small arms, laser and ion, sizzled off our armor plate.

"This isn't going well," my gunner observed. We were in a box canyon, big, but a box. I wasn't sure I could get us out without picking up a rider, and then we were well and truly screwed.

"Plasma ejector safety release." The ejectors are the big guns that don't eat ammo. Problem is, they're a serious power drain, with a separate capacitor system to keep them going, and you have to be careful with how you use them. The pilot is usually the commander of the Raptor. We decide where the thing goes after all, and all the firepower in the world is no good if you can't get it the right place.

She actually grinned. I didn't know it at the time, I checked the cockpit logs later like I usually do. She was new after all. I haven't got time to be checking out how my gunner's reacting while it's going on. But her shots were straight on, laying plasma over the crowd at the end of the box.

I'd have some choice words for the company commander about our maps. We were gone. Back to the hunt, with that spot on the map marked for attention by Battle Company ASAP. Fifteen minutes, they said. The 'Raisers were moving in.

Thing of beauty, that is. I've seen it on occasion, and the 'Raisers are worth watching by the time you've lost all sympathy for the target. Usually, you start with none anyways.

* * *

Raining again. "Mood music." Crazy girl, but I'd started to like her. And it was. We were south, big storm coming in over the Gulf, hurricane season. Rain is something you celebrate most of the time. Anyone in Full Environmental Battle Armor or a vehicle can operate in it. But they rarely want to. Rain ruins your vision, soaks everything's temp down in infrared. About the only thing it doesn't stop is radar, and that's got its own problems.

I'm pretty sure our Raptor would have blown water off its muzzle like a dog and grinned if it could. Rain didn't bother us much. We're forward echelon, recon. We like the rain. It's easy to hide in. Yes, you _can_ hide a Raptor. You can hide anything with a big enough hill, just like we were right now, poking our nose over it.

"Got movement, sending it over." Window-within-my-view popped up. I sometimes wonder how they ever managed to fight the big wars before the Catacylsm, before modern VR, before our sensor tech, before even _electronics_. How had anyone ever done anything?

"Little guy, humanoid, bulky. Titan scout." I judged. Titan Robotics. Purveyors of the finest combat robot walkers that ain't an IAR model. Titans are old designs, underarmed, but they're tough. And despite their bulked up rounded bodies and dome heads, they're also more agile then they've seemingly got any right to be. I've seen a Titan assault model tapdance before. Literally, I am not at all kidding, I worked with a merc pilot who knew how to make a fifteen-meter-tall robot _tapdance_. A 'Smasher could probably do the same thing, but it's not as big. As for us, no way was a Raptor ever going to do that.

"I don't want to be taking on stuff like this on my first run." Combat jitters? This girl had hosed Worm Wraiths without blinking. I suppose it was because those are infantry. Supernatural-horror infantry, but infantry, and therefore small. An IAR isn't that big either, only a few meters. But it's a lot bigger then the guys out there in Full Environmental Battle Armor or power armor, usually a lot tougher and more deadly.

"Relax," I breathed, partially to myself, scouting raises your blood pressure. "He's not radiating. He might just be out for a walk." On guard, you generally light off your radar and any other active sensors. New Hope's garrison had provided images and electronics fingerprint for the vehicles that had taken part in the raid. We weren't close enough to make out more than a silhoutte and he didn't have his actives on though, no point in jumping to conclusions.

Command acknowledged our target-designating. Without satellites, we operate RPVs instead for over-the-horizon comms. They don't make good scouts though. They're too easily shot down or fooled; it takes a sentient mind to recognize or resist a psionic or magical illusion. So the Raptor crews soldier on.

"Just lit off." All efforts to remain calm go out the window. Few things focus the mind like short-range painting by hostile radar.

"Locking movement. Missile safety release, don't shoot unless he does." I replied. Three-centimeter band radar, Red Vixen, a common enough aftermarket upgrade for Titans. Just because we were well inside his detection range didn't mean he saw us. We were not moving, one of the best forms of camoflague known to man, and he wasn't seeing enough of us to paint a picture of a Raptor, just a bump. If he was really sharp, that might be enough. We'd know in a moment.

"Positive match on his emissions, he was in the raid…his radar's off." Good girl. I wish my last gunner had been as helpful.

"Roger, uplinking to Command." That got things rolling. Other Raptors would be routed to try and find a way around this guy, which shouldn't be hard, and any of his friends, which would probably be a bit tougher. Turning a flank is the second oldest military manuver in the book, right after forming a line.

Why had our friend turned on his radar? Spooked, almost certainly. What by? That's like some kind of fear-based Rorschach test. Whatever creepiness or horrible death is drifting through your mind at the moment might in fact really be out here. About the only thing you _don't_ have to worry about here is werewolves. They mostly live in Canada.

So we sat, watching our friend, and watching around us. The enemy you can see is not the only one, after all. And the one we could see faded in and out, flickered, or stayed constant for minutes on end depending on the whims of the rainstorm.

We relay a more-or-less constant feed back to Command, via a directional sheathed antenna, but the reverse is not true; their communications don't have the virtue of being pointed away from the bad guys usually. RF isn't common, so you don't spread it around in case somebody notices…usually. And there are dead zones you have to stumble into to find. But when Command talks to you, they've got something worth saying.

"Found a camp. Activate taccom and eliminate any hostiles." Taccom is what you use when you're throwing away the quiet schtick and want coordination. Instead of a continous feed to command, we send one to every other Raptor in Recon Company, and they send theirs back. We all see each other, we all see what bad guys the others see, we all have a pretty good idea of how each other's Raptors are doing. At no effort on our part.

"Guns armed." She was good, but new. I looked at the taccom map and the posistions of the other Raptors, and the camp.

"Negative, missiles, I don't want to spend the time fucking around with this guy." I replied. He was a Titan scout, and severely underarmed; the best gun he might have would be an aftermarket P-beam rifle that was about as good as one of our two plasma ejectors. We could eat him alive with the rails, lasers, and ejectors, but Titans are built to last, and knocking him out would take time, thirty or forty-five seconds. That was a short eternity for how time is measured in combat. "The camp's gonna have a lot of individual vehicles that need stomping, and they're gonna run every which way."

"Four AP, locked." That was good choice and I said so. "Launching. Radar to active."

And we went over the top. The Titan was trying to get back up. He did the stupid thing and fired, rather than the smart thing and blow his reactor emergency shutdown to surrender. For that he received a double dose of plasma that burned through his badly managled armor and fried his reactor shielding.

An uncontrolled fusion reaction like this isn't as impressive as it sounds. But it is impressive in one way: when the bottle shatters and the genie gets out, it burns. I flinched, even though the IR view has built-in dampeners, even though we were still a couple hundred meters away, as reactor plasma jetted out of the hole in the Titan's chest. He was out of the fight, the pilot probably had a lethal case of rad poisoning, and we were headed for the base camp.

Three Raptors had hit the place with six-missile frag spreads, airburst. Anyone without a full suit of FEBA on was dead, missing whatever bodyparts of the suit they'd had off, or one lucky bastard. Anyone with a suit on had about fifty-fifty odds. We met a hovercycle screaming in our direction, but he didn't make it; my gunner threw a hail of laserfire at him and he tried to avoid, didn't manage it, lost some control surfaces, hit the ground, and bounced. He'd be smeared over the inside of his armor at best.  
Taccom was saying that the other Raptors had charged in behind their missile volleys and were hunting folks scattering on foot. It was a futile effort; a man on foot cannot flee from a Raptor. One was engaged with a modified Big Boss ATV that had apparently been up and running, but that was going to be onesided fight. The Big Boss series are more or less the size of, and armored like, a Pre-Cataclysm tank, but they're short on guns even more than Titans.

Which brought me to our next problem.

* * *

"OH FUC-" echo'd over the comms. Raptor Four's taccom signal went down.

"Assault Titan, Assault Titan! Shit, he just grabbed Four and threw him!" There are things we're more afraid of then getting too close to something that big, but there are damn few of them. Raptors are small, light. That's our strength. But the bigger boys, they play mean. And they can pound you to shit or do just what the Assault Titan had done.

There was a thudding over the comms and Raptor Five's gunner swearing, his portside missile tubes down. The thuds would probably be the Assault Titan's heavy railgun making the connection.

"Warm up the missile tubes, all of them, I don't care what we've got loaded." A Raptor has sixteen missile tubes. Each has two minimissiles. They are our best weapon, our sword and shield in time of trouble, because they let us put out a god-awful amount of damage in one go. A single full volley from a Raptor will match that from much heavier walkers.

Over the rise, and then we hit a patch of scree. Things like this aren't on the map, which is a real problem. I fought the controls, kept us upright, but not stable enough to fire. Then we were on dirt again, and we could shoot. Sixteen missiles roared off; six AP, six frag, four plasma, the standard tube loadout.

The Assault Titan was standing in the middle of the camp, over what I hoped wasn't Raptor Four. Surrounding it was the usual post-battle wreckage and bodies, and the occasional apparently intact tent or vehicle; the tents were probably perforated to hell, but the vehicles might be okay.A couple of apparently inactive Scout Titans were around too.

Raptor Five and Raptor Three circled the bigger robot, slashing at it with laser and railgun fire and trying not to take hits in return as our missile volley arrowed in. The Assault Titan spun on one heel, showing the agility of its kind, and _shot down_ some of the missile flight. Great, not only was it big, it had some hotshot gunner bastard.

Our Raptor's computers were reporting at least six good hits, and a few misses. "Second volley?" asked the gunner. This one could only be twelve missiles.

I turned hard right at five hundred meters, not wanting to get closer. Railgun fire shot over our heads as I ducked the Raptor by relaxing the knees; you can't do it any other way with the walker's body structure and it doesn't bend forward. "Second volley."

Raptor Five took more heavy-calibur railgun hits while we set up for the shot, tearing away most of the already damaged left wing structure. It swayed, badly unbalanced, the pilot fighting for control, and then the top armor blew off and two ejection seats fired into the rain as "Ejecting!" came over the comms.

"Now, hit him now!" I urged. We had to give the Assault Titan's gunner something else to worry about. Not everyone tries to kill ejected pilots, but the supply of good will between Pecos Raiders and the Coalition States is very small.

"Launching." Twelve more missiles. We were dry. Five hundred meters is long range for our plasma ejector, comfortable for both rails and lasers…both of which are more suitable for anti-personnel then anti-armor work. _Again_ this bastard hotshot Titan gunner shot some of the missiles down, but not as many. Eight hits from this volley, but most of the hits were frag: they'd do damage, but not the sort of armor-rending damage that we really needed.

"Three, if you've got missiles left now would be a good time." We were plinking away with railguns and lasers, putting out enough firepower to level a block of houses, but the Titan still had enough ceramisteel plate to stop it. He was hurt though, big craters in the torso armor, what looked like half a thigh blown away, but still agile, still dangerous. Laserfire sizzled against our armor.

"Negative, he shot down our flights, fratricided." _Damn!_ Whenever someone manages to shoot down missiles, like our hotshot Titan gunner friend, some of them will detonate. We try to program the guidance system to spread them out a little, but sometimes there isn't time or distance for the missiles to do that. And a frag warhead detonating in the middle of a flight can take them all down.

"We need the plasma ejectors," my gunner warned. "I'm just ruining his paintwork here."

"I know, I know. Slashing pass, three hundred, stand by." I skidded the Raptor into a sharp turn, barely avoiding a salvo of heavy railgun slugs. "Take the shot."

"Firing." The plasma ejectors vomited star-stuff at the Titan as I spun the lower torso again, while the upper never moved a wit and the ejectors fired again. "Winged him."

The Raptor abruptly tilted crazily to one side and I had to fight the controls to restablize it as heavy-calibur railgun fire thundered into us, amputating the starboard wing railgun. My gunner muttered a curse.

Raptor Three had taken the chance to close in and pump out a couple of shots at the Titan as well while we were distracting it at least, and I could make out moving parts in the damaged leg. We had to retask our lasers to dealing with some infantry who were getting ideas thanks to their big friend, and the remaining railgun was running low.

"Another pass, hit the leg or we're going to be in deep trouble." I turned in again, praying to whatever deities might happen to be listening, and heard the plasma ejectors roar to life through our armor. The Titan was trying to shield his damaged leg from us, but he couldn't from both Raptors.

We missed the leg, hitting higher up. "_Dammit!"_ my gunner blurted, and I swung hard, trying to avoid the inevitable retaliation and escaping the railgun but not the lasers. Armor damage warnings sounded. Raptor Three closed in and fired. The shots were too high, and for a moment I wondered if they'd even aimed.

Then I realized they had, just not at the leg. The Titan abruptly wobbled and started to fall with terrible slowness, increasing as it tilted, finally crashing down. The noise stopped, abruptly, as it does sometimes. The Raiders were cowering, and rightly so. We slowed down and surveyed the field for movement.

"Splash. Cockpit kill." Raptor Three's gunner called.

"Confirm." I agreed. "Good shooting, Three."

"You cracked it," he returned. "We taking these guys' surrenders?" Raiders were coming out with their hands up. Command jumped on him for thinking otherwise, but having seen the town I didn't really blame him.

Other Raptors crested the ridge we'd charged over, having dealt with other scouts. Three detailed himself to looking after the crew of Raptor Five, and one of the new arrivals dismounted his gunner to check on Raptor Four.

One job over. Wait for recovery.


	2. Abolisher

Abolisher

AN: For the record, from now on the stories will dedicated to their particular IAR model in order. This one took a little longer. I'm not overly fond of the Abolisher, having lost a couple characters to the type, which may have something to do with it; I had to restrain my urge to blow it up despite wanting to tell a story with it.

Officially she is Abolisher Four; we call her "Divine Monster" sometimes, and occasionally "you bitch" when she doesn't behave well. She is our home away from home, our sanctuary and refuge, savior and vindicator; an old but solid IAR-2 Abolisher.

Her infrared systems tend to ghost a little, because that's just the way she likes things. Her laser turret traverses a little faster than design spec; her autocannon are solid, dependable things just like they were meant to be. Her armor is solid, her powerplant performs well. She has a soul, like most machines her age do.

Abolishers are not, really, subtle machines. When you're more than ten meters tall and armed to the teeth, subtley grows difficult. We break lines, go after enemy heavies, function as mobile artillery support. Very few things can wreak more havoc then we.

It takes a crew of five to man an Abolisher; three gunners, one pilot, one commander. Ours was Lieutenant Holmes, but to us she would always be Mother Alice. A sweet, caring woman, and a longtime Abolisher crewmember who had served as pilot for one of the prototypes and been a pilot of a UAR-1 Enforcer before that, she treated us as her own family. Mother Alice would look after you, we said, and she did. She was there when I joined the unit and the crew as a PFC junior gunner, and she was still there when I became a Sergeant senior gunner a couple years later. She was a strange person to find in her job, perhaps why she never was promoted past lieutenant, but she did it well.

Today we were walking west, on a "redeployment under own power" to a new base. The Abolishers were in line-abreast, five hundred meters apart roughly, but stationkeeping wasn't emphasized in broken terrain. The Skull Smashers and Hellraisers of Battle Company were around as well, slightly ahead and intermixed depending on other things, while the Raptors of Recon Company were out ahead and on the flanks.

We weren't exactly relaxed, you never are, but neither were we expecting trouble. For those of us in the commander's, senior gunner's and driver's posistions the effort was to stay awake; the gentle rocking motion of an Abolisher at speed causes that. For the junior gunners' posistions, it tends to induce queasiness. That's why they have junior gunners in them.

* * *

It began, as it usually does, with Recon Company finding something too big to be dealt with on the spot. In this case, it was a Rift. A big one.

A Rift is a hole in spacetime, the result of extensive abuse of local physics by magic or psionics. It can connect to any other active Rift, anywhere and even in theory anywhen. Dimensional barriers and time are no object to a Rift. It's already breaking all the rules.

This is, of course, extremely dangerous. A Rift is only a semi-permeable barrier, so if you open one to an ocean somewhere the water's not going to come pouring in, nor if the other end is in vacuum will you lose all your air. But there is no way to tell what's on the other side. I have, once, in my twenty or so times I've been near a Rift, seen humans come through; I suppose they dove into another and got interdimensionally lost.

Every other time, they've been monsters of some kind. They run the range and the gamut. Anything you can imagine, some things you can't, and many you just don't want to. Our job is to send them back or kill them.

This time, it looked like killing was going to be required. Recon Company was falling back after having been engaged without warning. They reported demons, dragons, creatures of magic, in number.

"Senior gunner, fire sequence."

Our main weapons are six 120mm autocannons. They are useable in both direct-fire and artillery roles. The Abolisher is designed to fight in all directions at once if required, so only two of them can be brought to bear on a single target in theory. Despite this, we can pull a manuver known as a "whirlie" if we want to hit something with all six.

The big guns elevated, locking in on trajectories and paths for their shells transmitted from Recon Company as it fell back. "Fire sequence." The sound of the big guns came through the armor as a surprisingly toneless _woof-woof_, repeated twice in a quarter of a minute. "Sequence complete."

Downrange, via taccom, we could see the shells hit. The most junior of the gunners would be watching via his VR interface and that via Recon Company to assess damage done by our shells. He passed on a "Good shoot." That meant we hit where we aimed; whether where we aimed had done any good wasn't in our hands at the moment; that was up to Recon Company.

"More coming in. Senior gunner?" Mother Alice occasionally dropped some of the protocol.

"I see it." I said. "LeStrange, take sequence two. Fire sequence."

"Fire sequence." Lance Corporal LeStrange is of Asian decent, a relative rarity in the CS, but a good gunner, and would probably make Corporal soon…at which point we stood a good chance of losing him to Battle Company.

_Woof-woof._ _Woof-woof._ The guns sound sullen, not truly angry, through our armor. Like they wanted to be heard to roar, or heard not at all, but couldn't manage that. "Sequence complete."

"Sequence complete." I agreed.

We were still closing on the battle site. The Skull Smashers had gone ahead, eager to "get stuck in" like they usually are. It takes a particular type to use each model to its best, and the 'Smasher requires a bit of the hellion. Most of the 'Raisers had gone with them, but one stayed back for each Abolisher. Terrible though our destructive power is, powerful though our metal-shod fists and feet are, Abolishers are not agile and they do not function well in close combat. The 'Raisers were our escorts.

Only a low ridge now to go. We crested it.

* * *

And entered hell.

The landscape was torn and charred. _Things_ stalked over it, smaller than any but the lightest of us. Looking at them was safe, but trying to understand how they walked made the back of your neck tingle and your head hurt. And they threw lightning and fire.

"Fire at will." Mother Alice. Bless her, keeping her head when everyone else wanted to go to pieces.

"LeStrange, take the left. I've got the right." We have seen hell before, and you can build up a tolerance to almost anything. It's the first shock, the shock that you feel every time you look at it for the first time that particular day or engagement or whatever, that marks it as hell. The guns were in direct fire mode as they swung and fired under our command, supporting the 'Smashers and 'Raisers. The 'Raisers were mostly in close combat, as suited them. The 'Smashers stood off a little, suiting their armaments until they expended their missile stores.

These things bled light, I noted distractedly, slamming another one to the ground with a dual strike from the cannons. Some of the 'Raisers and Smashers were down, but not many. More of the things. The Rift was still open, and some were still coming through it.

Along with something else.

A dragon? It had to be. It looked like one. Neck wings body tail. The computers weren't returning a match on its species. It turned towards us. A bolt lanced out, impacting our armor.

"Put that thing down." Mother Alice sounded aggrived. Just as the crew was her family, the Abolisher was too.

"You heard the lady." Laserfire from the lower defense turret joined my guns to hammer at the thing, firing VT-frag at it, watching the fragments tinkle off its hide but cut into its wings. The lasers did more. It didn't like them, shearing away and climbing rapidly.

"Arc'd out. Sorry sir." Our guns can only elevate 75 degrees, and this thing had found the express elevator; a natural thermal from so many beams, fireballs, bolts, and energy-based warheads. As for the "sir" bit to Mother Alice, the Army recognizes no formal difference between officers of different sexes; they are all to be addressed as "sir."

"'Raisers will handle it. Keep on the line." Our escorting Hellraiser was trying to do just that, slamming a particle beam into the dragon, which made it _very_ unhappy and try to retaliate, but it missed, afraid of the next shot enough to be doing some rather impressive aerobatics.

Then, abruptly, the pilot hopskipped us sideways. LeStrange muttered a curse about the wasted shot he'd just taken, but it was an empty curse. The driver was pretty good, to be doing that sort of thing with an Abolisher. Most people wouldn't be able to. A lot of Abolisher pilots would crack up rather than even try.

A bolt of lightning, a _big_ bolt, shot past us. Then another hit dead on. The pilot swore and then yelled "Brace!"

Freefall is never, ever, a fun sensation. Then blackness.

* * *

The armor saved our lives. Yes, we wear FEBA in the cockpit. Occasionally some joker tries to teleport in, and while he's more likely to kill himself doing it, it's still a threat. And the Urban Warrior suits are called _padded_ bodyarmor for a reason. Most FEBA is, in fact most FEBA is designed so that you can more or less comfortably _live_ in the suit, but the Urban Warrior is padded _both_ ways. That's why we wear it in the cockpit. When you take a tumble, it protects you.

"LeStrange?" I could see his armor. His arm was moving.

"Here."

"You boys okay?" Mother Alice. Thank god, if you believe in him, or the Chi-Town Armory, if you believe in your armor and its trauma-locking system. When you go freefall, the armor detects it and locks.

LeStrange and I answered affirmative. The pilot said something aggrieved about his back. The junior gunner didn't answer, but I had no chance to dwell on that. We were moving; a 'Smasher had detailed itself to look after us, very decent of him considering we didn't have much of a left leg anymore.

Whatever had chucked those beams had gone down to combined fire from the rest of Heavy Company, or at least made itself scarce. Mother Alice got the 'Smasher to help us sit up so we could fire, and we went back to it. Our escorting 'Raiser was hovering about, but it didn't actually have a free hand to use in a combat situation; one hand was occupied by its multifunction Quattro-Gun, and the other was a large vibroblade pincer.

We hadn't been out of the fight for long. Maybe a minute at most. Most of the 'Smashers were in hand-to-hand now. The 'Smasher is considered medium-heavy for a combat walker, but it has the lightness and agility of some of the lighter Titan series. Built like a linebacker, it has the lightness and grace to do ballet or any of a variety of martial arts. Seeing a combat walker do an akido-type flip/throw is _very_ impressive.

Mother Alice had unstrapped to check on our junior gunner. LeStrange and I were busy addressing targets; the pilot had taken over the defensive laser turret; range one klick to the line was getting long for it, but we weren't going to run out of power.

Mother Alice swore something vicious behind me, which couldn't possibly mean anything good about the state of the junior gunner. He was just a kid, Private Will Freeman; he hadn't even completed a full Robot and Power Armor Gunnery course, just Basic Gunnery. He'd been assigned to us because we needed a new junior gunner and he'd been all that was handy. Smart, good kid, not so great as a gunner but learning. I spared a moment to hope for his uncrippled survival.

You fall into a semi-aware state when doing this sort of thing. You are addressing targets, but you are operating on a level somewhere below concious thought because there simply isn't mental processing power left for that. You aren't thinking, you are simply doing, quickly, accurately, like a biological computer. You will speak and be spoken to and not remember, down targets and when you come out of it have no idea how the enemies no longer threatening you got that way.

Battles have an ebb and flow. This one wanted to wind down but wasn't being allowed to. We had pushed them back but didn't want to get close to an active Rift. We had also expended an uncomfortable but not yet serious amount of ammo. They, by contrast, weren't getting much in the way of reinforcement anymore, but several dragons had appeared to stiffen their defense and nobody really wanted to tangle with them up-close.

A few aircraft had arrived on-scene, denying our opponents the sky; powerful as they are, dragons are no real match in the flying department for jet fighters. And now more new flying arrivals, Super SAMAS from the Lone Star Complex, platoon strength. More yet on the way. A major engagement shaping up.

Field reload on the way. Keep addressing targets and be ready to fall back for rearm. Just another day in the service.


	3. Skull Smasher

Skull Smasher

AN: For the record, these are not always the same people. I simply wanted to write first-person; think of it as a Coalition-published book with heavy reliance on primary sources, if it helps. (Yes, I _know_ the Coalition's not big on literacy, but the Level 17-and-above folks have gotta read _something_.)

* * *

Infantry support duty is, relatively, undangerous. There are of course plenty of ways to get yourself killed doing it, as there are in any sort of combat situation. But at least engaged in infantry support most of the ways to die require you to be actively stupid as opposed to merely unlucky.

This does not make it unstressful. You are directly responsible for the safety of a lot of people usually. Platoon, sometimes a company. You are also painfully aware that they are desperately vunerable and very small compared to your Skull Smasher, and you _cannot_ go ahead of them to take every hit, spring every trap. Infantry, despite being small and nearly helpless, compensate for this by being fiendishly clever and and numerous. Enough laser rifles pointed at anything will cause it pain. I have seen dragons brought down by the combined fire of whole companies, evaporate both literally and metaphorically in under a minute. The same thing can happen to us. And there are less direct and more dangerous traps too.

Today we cleared the ruins of an old town, probably pre-Cataclysm. Time and the plains had been kind to it, and it was nearly intact. The expenditure of munitions to knock it down could not be justified, as it was not actually within nominal Coalition territory, about ten klicks beyond. But it was an obvious staging area in the new American wilderness that had swallowed so much of the pre-Cataclysm world without a trace, and it had to be checked regularly.

And if it happened to be occupied, then we could knock it down. That would not be terribly difficult for a 'Smasher with a full load of missiles, or an infantry company. The buildings were not reinforced for the most part. Laserfire would pierce most of them with ease. What didn't succumb to that, missiles would deal with.

"First squad taking fire," crackled in our ears, my driver and I. Transmissions between IAR units are very clear, high-quality. We have big radios. Infantry armor includes a radio as well, but given its size they had to choose between transmission quality and resistance to jamming. Perfectly reasonably, they selected the latter. However, it also means that an IAR company can usually identify each other by voice without callsigns. Infantry can't.

"Move up?" The pilot asked on the infantry command channel.

"Wait for a moment. The rest of the platoon is flanking."

I listened over the audio sensors to the sharp _crack_s of high-energy weaponry. They suddenly increased.

"More of them. Platoon strength at the least. Move in." The pilot throttled up to walk pace and headed into town.

We could have just crashed through the buildings. The Smasher is equipped for this, designed for it. Heavyset but agile, we are intended to push our way through anything or anyone.

However, crashing through buildings announces your presence very effectively. We did that differently; missile tubes sent shots arcing over the buildings to strike offending posistions before we arrived on the street we were wanted at.

If they had been smart, they would have fallen back. They were not smart. Particle and ion fire lashed them for their mistake, heavy-calibur, tearing away large chunks of the buildings they had been using for cover.

"Overkill," the pilot muttered, halting. No return fire came our way as I traversed the guns down the block. Theyd gotten the hint by then, it seemed, and made tracks.

"Missiles!" The pilot suddenly swung us around and down, and I retargeted with the particle beam, knocking one from the sky but failing to trigger the chain reaction I'd hoped for. We took a couple hits, AP, damaging but not dangerous; most blew chunks out of the street thanks to the pilot's efforts.

Counterbattery was already locked in and I rippled off a few missiles back at it, whatever it was. The missiles would hopefully find something they could do their own detecting and attacking of on; otherwise they would simply hit the ground and go off. So much for the BVR engagement, then.

The infantry moved up, two squads to either side, one ahead, keeping at least fifteen meters between us and them. Nobody really wants to get too close to us. We have big feet and big fists after all.

"Light vehicles." They were. Light, infantry vehicles. Coalition APCs are tanks in their own right, designed to lift half a platoon each. These were smaller, boxier things, designed to lift a squad at most and provide light supporting fire to it, equipped with light autocannons that pattered off our armor. Whether they had been unlucky or thought they could take us was immaterial. We sent turrets flipping through the air as their ammunition cooked off from our guns, smashed them flat with repeated stomps, scooped one up and threw it into a storefront upside down.

They were no threat, no challenge. Our 'Smasher bestrode the battlefield like a god of war, with its big, forward-thrust death's head and jet-black armor. Where we went, enemies died and vehicles exploded.

The lock-threat audible went off. Now things became interesting.

* * *

It wasn't familiar. It looked too clean, too sleek, to be a cobbled-together one-off, but the computer was not returning a match. Unpleasant but not unheard of. It had lasers in medium calibur and particle beams in heavy; unpleasantly heavy. Our rejoiner was unpleasantly heavy ion and a pair medium-calibur missiles as we moved in. We carry few of the medium-size missiles mainly because if you need a lot of them, you are in way over your head.

The mediums surprised him. He apparently thought he was dealing with smalls or minis and ignored them. The brilliant silver flashes, brilliant even through our automatically-adjusting optics, of detonating plasma warheads taught him better. We engaged over low buildings at a range of approximately five hundred meters. Knife-fighting between combat robots of our class and apparently his.

The Smasher was light on its feet, agile. The pilot juked and ducked and dodged, avoiding some but not all incoming fire. The infantry kept their heads down and did not get involved in a fight that was way out of their weight class.

More missiles, minis, but he reacted as though we were chucking the mediums again. I doubted he'd ever react differently to any missile launch we made. He shot down the three-launch, but we mauled him with guns since he had to stop for a stable gun platform to do it.

Flashes from his arms. Silver muzzle flash, which meant...

Armor-damage warnings. Silver blooms on our frontal armor. "What the _fuck_ was that?" the pilot demanded.

"Naruni. Plasma cartridges." I replied. "Setting for continous salvo. Emptying the tubes." We'd both had a secondary mission here, help our infantry against the other guys', so we both had been playing it conservative. That had just gone out the window as far as I was concerned. Naruni Arms weaponry is rare, rare enough we're not actually sure who makes it or where, extremely advanced. We were in over our heads.

When in doubt, as they say in Basic, empty your weapon. We salvoed our remaining four medium missiles and the mini triple-tube was emptying as fast as I could get the other 21 rounds out. Our opponent _really_ didn't like that, and spewed laser and particle and plasma cartridge fire all over the place trying to knock down our flights. It got one of the mediums, but two solid AP hits blasted into one of its arms, ruining it, and a plasma took a big chunk out of the forward-thrust chest. The minimissiles were all frag, showering the thing with bits of metal, ruining its paintwork mainly but about one in three getting shot down.

"Close combat." This is more or less telling the gunner "you're not much use anymore" which was true enough in this case. I could still contribute; our heavy ions are placed right in front of our center of mass, so holding down the trigger for them in close combat is standard procedure. But it was mostly out of my hands.

The pilot, his name is Dave Malcom by the way, waded through the buildings behind the last of the mini-missile salvos. The Naruni combat bot had gotten a rather extensive showering with hypersonic metal fragments. Mostly, it hadn't been terribly effective, but the lenses on its head were cracked and starred. Maybe we'd managed to screw up its sensors, maybe not.

The other bot moved to meet us, throwing a punch that missed, and then things got complex enough that I wasn't really able to follow the exchange of blows. A good Smasher pilot can turn the machine into a giant frenetic. Kicks and punches flew back and forth, parried and blocked, or not quite. The other machine was definitely getting the worst of it, but we did not get it all our way. There was the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of seeing the view abruptly change because the main sensors were knocked out, and knowing those were seperated from me by approximately two-thirds of a meter of equipment and armor.

That seems like so much more before you think about it in the face of actual damage.

Close combat is not a terribly effective way to disable another combat robot. It works well against living things, even supernatural and supernaturally tough ones, because on some level even a dragon remains squishy. Not very squishy, but still squishy. They get cut, bleed, holler when they get hurt.

Another combat walker does none of these things. It does not bruise, concuss, get knocked out. It feels no pain and never tires. Something alive with its arm as badly hurt as our Naruni friends would have been clutching at it and probably howling. Instead of that, we got hit repeatedly with an arm gone limp below the shoulder.

It was an innovative but not terribly effective trick. One becomes inured to loud clangs aboard a Smasher, which was all that was mainly good for. I was holding down the trigger for the heavy ions, and they were doing a good bit of damage; the pilot was mainly focused on keeping our opponent from bringing the weapons on his other arm to bear, and abusing further the already-abused head of our opponent. Shoulder blocks and punches, a kick or two, but we knocked it back rather than over.

It got its good arm in posistion to fire and blew our particle beam clean off. But at the same time, something blurred near our opponent's waist, then the eye-hurtingly brillant silver blooms of detonating fusion blocks.

Blessed be the infantry, foolhardy and brave. A swarm attack, climbing on the enemy robot and setting charges, is generally considered an act of desperation because it is likely to kill both attacker and attacked, but they had pulled off a classic one. A lesser machine, even our 'Smasher, would have found a couple of D-class fusion blocks to be a battle ender. The Naruni machine didn't, but the charges bashed in its waist so that it couldnt move that joint anymore.

It was all over then bar the shouting. Losing one joint like that sounds a lot less devestating then it actually is when engaged in hand-to-hand combat, particularly against a very agile machine like a Smasher. We simply danced around him then, and he eventually fell.

Per tradition, drinks for the infantry platoon were on us. It would set us back about a week's pay probably. That seemed a fair trade.


	4. Hellraiser

**Hellraiser  
**A/N: Yeah, I screwed up taking this long. I have no excuse, sir. There's a slight chance I'll write a SAMAS series as well, but inspiration for that isn't really coming to me.

Injured and tired, we were headed for home. A day and a half in Pecos Raiders territory had seen our quartet of Hellraisers reduced by one, and the others damaged. None of us had slept in that time. 'Raiser Three was fifty meters left, and its left arm twitched, mimicking the unconcious motions of its pilot's bad reaction to the stims he had taken to stay alert. It also had some armor damage on the head and chest from a tangle with a small group of Pecos Raiders. 'Raiser Four walked rear point, its crew apparently indefatiguable, no noticible difference in their unit's movements despite having seen it take a few hits, and their voices over the comms sounding exactly the same as they had at mission start. Kara and Janny had always been good.

'Raiser One, our Hellraiser, kept a slow, careful pace. We had leg damage, right leg, deep scars from energy bolts. The leg itself appeared much more intact than not, but the diagnostics were down and we had no way of determining how bad it was. So we babied the right leg along, limping in a motion that those unused to the quirks of combat robots would doubtless have found unnervingly human.

Usually, you don't have to watch the skies much with the Coalition. You can get air cover relatively easy, in impressive variety, and most of the folks you fight don't have comparable stuff. Yesterday we had learned an unpleasant lesson about this not always being true. Nobody had seen the jet fighter aircraft that had crippled 'Raiser Two until it was much too late.

'Raiser Two's crew hadn't had a chance as the rest of the flight concentrated on it. That was what had saved the rest of our lives, allowing us to scatter and put up defensive fire.

The second pass had been the one that damaged our 'Raiser, but we had sent two of the fighters away trailing smoke. One of the fighters was hurt badly; he hadn't dropped his full load in the first pass and our fire had detonated some of the bombs still under his wings, blowing part of one off. They swung away, down south, out of range, and we made tracks.

And where there are fighters conducting ground-attack missions on any old patrol they happened across, there are ground forces. We'd not seen them, but we knew they were there. Bombs are too hard to come by to drop them on people for shits and giggles.

We'd been free and clear, or something close, at first. That had lasted about five hours. Now we'd had intermittent contacts for nearly twelve, and they kept us moving. Never close enough to see, or get a good idea of what they were. But stuff was moving out there, and there was distinct sensation they were trying to herd us. We kept having to turn away from the route home, but we made a little more progress each time we turned towards it again.

Two hours to home.

"Contacts, multiple, zero-six-four, sixty klicks. Aircraft headed for the deck and inbound," my gunner warned. We strap in standing up, sideways to the 'Raiser's direction of travel, as the least of many evils. You eventually get used to the tugging feeling on the chestplate and hips of your FEBA. And in heavy combat, you do your utmost not to throw up inside your helmet. Aside from being intensely disgusting, it can kill you. We had a newbie pilot choke to death on his own vomit once.

Fortunately, the 'Raiser only truly requires a crew of one. Why it has two is something of a mystery. Perhaps the gunner is just for the extra survivablity of redundant parts. Perhaps they just didn't want to call him a classic aircraft-esque Guy In Back for sensors, since he wasn't in back.

"Scatter, scatter!" I called over the comms, throttling the Raiser up to its maximum run and hoping that it didn't manage to shake the teeth loose from my jaw this time. It always seemed to try. The gunner was muttering a prayer, probably about the right leg.

Missiles dropped free from the aircraft and accelerated towards us. The gunners opened up on them with particle beams for the first shot, switching to laser almost instantly for the more rapid rate of fire at shorter range. A few of the missiles were intercepted, a few more were destroyed or thrown off-course by those detonations.

I skidded our Hellraiser into a sharp turn, my chance to mutter a prayer about the leg. The gunner hit the switch for the ECM suite at the same moment. Combat robots rarely try to actually jam each other. We all have enough excess power to dump into our active sensors that when we're fighting at under two kilometers, you just can't do enough jamming that it won't be burned through.

But we do have trackbreakers, deceptive jammers meant to confuse about range and bearing. They don't work against a system with a human in the loop; the human reacts too slowly, by the time the human reacts the sensors have recognized the jamming and compensated.

But a missile doesn't react slowly.

It's always a bit weird to watch. Some of the missiles dove straight into the dirt, some of them turned away, some of them appeared to wobble in flight, their electronic brains confused. At least one blew up, deciding it had hopelessly lost the target and safety-detonating. The wobbling missiles realized their mistake but could not correct for the error, and safety detonated. The Hellraiser isn't like an Abolisher or a Smasher. You can hear the fragments _ping_ off the armor.

That just left the bombs. Fooling a missile is one thing; fooling a pilot is another. While bombs are naturally somewhat inaccurate, after you factor in computer-assisted targeting and the possiblity the bomb itself has some kind of guidance, it's a fool's hope to think that will help. Even at top speed and on its best day, there is simply no way for a Hellraiser to dodge a jet aircraft bombing from low altitude. You can do your best to make the pilot screw up, which honestly isn't much against a good pilot, and you can pray. The only real defense is to kill him before he drops his bombs, and the Hellraiser usually lacks sufficent firepower to manage this.

The gunner retargeted on the plane anyways, but only got off a couple shots before it was overhead. Thunder. The outside world goes brown and black. The robot stumbles, I fight the controls in a struggle to keep us standing but know with a sick certainity it's not going to work, we trip, sprawl face-first in the dirt. Helpless. Have to move, have to get up, or we'll die. Dirt and rocks raining down on the armor. The 'Raiser on its feet again, running.

They'd missed. Not by much, but when you're dealing with enough armor plate to stop fragments, things like "not by much" are important. They had missed ahead, though, so we had run into the smoke and crater and fallen. If there had been another one gunning for us, that would have been lethal.

'Raiser Three emerged from a cloud of dirt and smoke still standing, having swerved at the last second and used the cloud to confuse the second attacker. Still, it had taken a couple of missile hits. 'Raiser Four, Kara and Janny, apparently had icewater in their veins as they had shot down their attacker by ignoring the incoming missiles and hoping their trackbreaker did the work. Which it did.

Then the jets were gone.

"Damage check."

"Three, left arm is making funny noises, we're securing it." Damn, that meant his main weapon, the close-combat vibropincers, was useless.

"Four, new paint job."

"Contacts ahead," my gunner warned. "Tanks. Not heavy."

"Let's go through them." Kara's voice.

"We don't know what's behind them." Micheal from Raiser Three.

"You want to try crossing the Rio with those things behind us?" There was no hard terrain here to use against the tanks and slow them down. They were still slower than a 'Raiser flat out but the river has gotten deeper and wider since the Rifts came. Fish in a barrel is an entirely appropriate expression. "Engage them, but be careful about it. See if you can make them back off."

We were a kilometer out when the shooting started. They opened up with autocannon, and we replied with lasers. They did back off, trying to maintain the range. It was common sense; they couldn't fight us up close, which we were meant for and they were not.

Nobody was really accomplishing anything better than glancing hits, because we were trying not to get hit more than to hit them. If we'd gone the other way things would have been brutal and short, and honestly we would have lost.

Then the ground next to us erupted upward. My gunner, thinking rapidly, immediately spun up the vibroblade and stabbed. Why he did, I didn't know, until the demented shrek of the vibroblade making contact with metal sounded.

The dirt fell away to reveal an assault-class Titan, with the vibroblade currently cutting a hole in its hip.

"Oh _shit!_" Back up, back up, get the hell away from it. The Titan was having problems of his own, however, as he struggled to remain upright with serious leg damage. Particle beams from 'Raiser Three and 'Raiser Four hammered at him.

And railgun fire.

Railguns. We didn't have railguns.

The beautiful, beautiful shape of an IAR-5, its "wingtip" guns spun up and firing. " 'Raiser One, get away from him and we'll handle it."

"Work in progress." I replied.

After we'd managed to put a couple hundred meters between us and the Titan, the missiles came and ended the argument when he lost a leg. Other Raptors were hunting the tanks, moving around on their birdlike legs.

"Recon One, it's good to see you." Kara said.

"Likewise. Where's Raiser Two?"

"He didn't make it, Captain." I replied. "Jet aircraft jumped us, bombed Two."

"Get moving. We'll screen you. If they're using aircraft now, something big's going down and the techs will want your logs bad," was the reply.


End file.
